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Gems
General Information Gems are used to rig your minions in order to improve their stats. Getting good gems and using them appropriately is the key to victory. You can buy gems in the Lobby, or in treasure chests within floors, and improve them via combining in the Lobby. There are five standard types of gems, following minion stats: Besides type, gems also have tiers. For each tier, a gem's stat ranges randomly between a minimum and maximum stat bonus. Higher tier gems have higher stat bonus (both min and max), but due to wide quality range, a bad tier 6 gem can improve your minion less than a good tier 4 gem. Tier availability is tied to your progress in the Tower. The further you advance, the higher the tiers available to you. Bug: There is an anomaly affecting the Energy stat of minions when equipping them with an Energy bonus from a gem: in short, the bonus will actually apply at 150% of the displayed gem value. Gem Slots Every minion has up to 4 slots where gems can be placed and removed safely. (Equip gems to your minions via their 'Details' tab, or at the Minion Keeper in the Lobby.) There is a general pattern for how many slots a given minion has, depending on its species: *For a minion family with two evolutions (three forms), they get 1 initial slot for baby form, 2 for evolved one, and 3 for a fully-grown minion. *For a minion family with one evolution (two forms), the first form is akin to the previous evolved form: it has 2 initial gem slots ; and the 2nd form has 3. *For a minion species without an evolution (one form), the Minion is considered fully-grown and has 3 slots. An additional free gem slot for all minions at once is unlocked when you click the invitation to visit the SoGood website. Thus, all fully-grown Minions end up with 4 usable gemslots, in general. Exceptions: Two minion families do not conform to the above. First, Sealo's family (two forms): Sealo has only 2 slots(max), while Sealast has the regular 4(max). Secondly and more importantly, Archick's family: Archick has only 2 slots as well, but Arcticowl has only 3 slots. Indeed, Arcticowl is the only fully-grown Minion with only 3 gemslots. Gathering Gems Gems are primarily acquired by purchasing them from the Gem Salesman in the Lobby, at the end of every floor. The Gem Salesman's inventory refreshes whenever you clears a different floor, or load a saved game. Saving the game while standing at the Gem Salesman, then re-loading the game, is one way to shop for gems with high stat rolls. Besides, after defeating the Undead Sage, random gem chests may be found within the Tower's floors (excluding Sage floors). They grant a standard gem of random (rather low) tier, random type and value (within range of tier). Lastly, upon defeating the Talo Sage, you are rewarded a strong tier 10 gem (standard, random type). Hoarding Gems Gems are stocked in your gem inventory, accessed when doing business with the Gem Salesman, and also when equipping gems to minions (from the 'Minion' tab, or the Minion Keeper). This inventory has 10 pages holding up to 15 gems each, for a total of 150 gems carriable at a time (plus any gem equipped to your minions, whether with you or in the Minion Storage). In the inventory, you can freely move around or swap gems by first clicking one, then clicking its destination. Minor bugs: *Sometimes, when displacing a gem swiftly in the inventory, the animation might show the gem moving towards another spot than the one chosen. It is only visual however: once the animation is finished, the gem will instantly relocate to the intended spot. *When opening and closing the inventory several times in quick succession (when swapping gem on and from minions), said inventory may fail to appear visually when it should open: the page will be there, but you won't see it, not be able to click on the currently visible elements (which are actually background at this time). The page does function, however: if you mouse over the position of a gem, you will see its stats; and to get out of there, all you have to do is manage to reach the 'Return' button somewhere in the bottom-right corner (your cursor will react to hovering over it). This seems to happen more with a particularly crowded inventory (more difficult to load up all the gem data). To avoid this, allow a bit more time between closing and opening (1-2s). Moderate bug: If you reach the inventory limit and attempt to buy more gems, the shop will not inform you that buying an extra gem will replace the previous last gem in inventory with the new one. Gem Shop Here, nine tiers of gem quality are available throughout the game for you to buy. You can also sell gems you possess. There are four standard gems of three different tiers available for sale at a time: two of the current tier T (starting with 1), one T+2, and one T+3 ; no T+1 will appear at this time. For instance, at the beginning of the game, the shop's stall will display gems of tiers 1,1,3,4 ; while at the end of the game (after succeeding in the summit), that will be 6,6,8,9. Note: The gem store is refreshed every time you reload the game or clear another floor. Refreshed gems have a random type(stat) and a random stat value (within tier range). While all types/stats seem to be equiprobable, it appears that stat values rather follow a Gaussian ("bell curve") probability of appearing (or similar curve..) ; this means that you are more likely to encounter the values that are listed around the "middle" of the tier range, and that you will very rarely see those at the range extremities. The table below lists the stat range for each tier, as well as the costs for buying/selling/combining gems at a given tier. (Combining is included for cost comparisons)(Tiers above 9 are included to show the evolution of tier behaviour, and for the models) Again: tier 10 gems and above are not available for purchase, thus the intended stat range for these tiers are unknown. Besides, while you can still sell tier 10 gem that you combined from tier 9, it won't cost anything to further combine tier 10 gems. Moreover, for tier 11 and all following, there is no cost for either combining or selling. Remarks: From reading the above pricings and doing a few calculations, some financial considerations arise. *To acquire a gem of higher tier, it is less expensive to combine some previous-tier gems than buying a higher-tier gem directly, provided you already possess at least 2 of the 3 gem required for the combination. *One can make profit at the gem shop by selling a self-combined gem, but only when possessing all 3 needed gems already (not having to buy any), and not on all tiers: all except 1 and 9 (where the benefit would be exactly 0$). However, it is actually always more profitable to just sell the 3 gems outright, rather than having to substract the cost for their combination... So if you have some spare gems in your inventory that you won't use, don't bother combining and just sell away. *(These are mostly true up to Tier 9, obviously.) Note: Naturally, these considerations should remains secondary to the player; especially in comparison to considering the stats present on gems and their values. (see below) Gem Smithy Upon acquiring the second seal, Seal of Passion (from the Fire Sage), you are entitled to use the Gem Crafter's services in the Lobby, allowing you to combine gems. Combination requires 3 gems of the same tier, and results in one gem of the next tier. You combine gems by speaking to the Gem Crafter, which opens the crafting inventory, showing up your available gems. Here, you may select gems for combining by clicking them ; this will move the gem to a 'combine' slot. After having selected the three gems, you get a preview of the result of your combination: it appears as a gem in the 'combined' slot, and you can mouse over it to see the stats you would get. If you do not wish to perform the combination, you can click the "Reset" button that appears when a gem is selected; doing so will bring the selected gems back in the crafting inventory, into the first empty slots. Note: ''In the crafting inventory, you cannot directly move gems around, as you would in the gem inventory by clicking them. (Actually, you may accidentally swap two gems by clicking too fast somewhere in-between them, but that's more of a glitch) The better quality the component gems are, the better is the resulting one. The resulting gem stats are proportional to the sum of the component gems' stats. Multi-stat Gems While all the gems you may acquire directly from NPCs or chests during the game are standard (monotype) gems, combination allows you to create mixed-type gems, by combining diffent-type gems together. ''Note: The colour patterns for mixed gems depends on the resulting stat values on the gem: the proportion of stat values related to one another determines the total "angular" surface occupied by a colour in the gem. (Ex: you combine gems with Attack and Speed bonus' in order to obtain one that has twice as much Attack bonus as Speed bonus; then, on the mixed gem you obtain, the orange hue will cover twice as much surface/angle as the blue hue in total.) The angular repartition (pattern) of the colours is generated randomly at the time of the combination ; you can preview it when selecting the gems to combine (and you can reset the same gem combination several times for different-looking results, but that's just cosmetic). Remark: Although this gives the possibility of gems with multiple stats and minions with personalized stat bonus', such gems are less powerful compared to specialized ones, because the resulting stat is proportional to the input stat. (For instance, if you put 1 "sample" of a stat when combining for a mixed gem, that's a lower input per stat than when combining for an equivalent standard where you put 3 "samples" of the same stat.) Thus, some players may find these mixed gems generally less useful, because they usually want to heavily adjust 1-2 stats. Formula While combining gems, you may find it hard to figure out the exact formula for the stat output ; and even then, from times to times, you may notice some recurring inconsistencies... Indeed, the formula seems to be somewhat instable, especially between gem tiers ; moreover, the apparent values of gems themselves actually seem not very honest sometimes... So, further testing has been performed to attempt figure out the real formula, and other details. You can read the results at this page: Gem Combination Category:Gameplay